The Arrivals

Chapter 11

Chloe wasn’t quite as confused when she woke this time. She remembered stretching out on the cot in an oversize tent filled with boxes and bins. Before that, she remembered a walk through the desert after waking up half paralyzed under a strange sky with an extra moon. She remembered being carried by a cowboy, and she had a hazy memory of being cared for by a woman who acted like a nurse but looked like a burlesque dancer. What Chloe couldn’t recall was anything between being at the bar and that first moment waking up on the ground. More important, she had begun to suspect that this wasn’t a hallucination. She had no logical explanation for the weird sky, the large lizard that looked suspiciously like a dragon, or the Wild West characters who’d brought her to this strange campsite. If they weren’t a hallucination and this wasn’t a coma dream of some sort, she was in a new world—which was scientifically improbable and, quite bluntly, scary as hell.

She took a deep breath. Breathing means not dead. Just to be sure, she checked her pulse.

“It’s real. You’re awake.” Kitty stood in the doorway of the tent. She still looked like a dancer, and the soft voice was still more soothing than any nurse’s Chloe had ever met.

“Thank you,” Chloe said. “You were here. I remember . . . some.”

“Good.” Kitty let the heavy material fall shut behind her. In her hand, she clutched a long swath of fabric. “You’ll adjust, but it’ll take a few more days to get your strength back.”

“How long did I sleep? Strength back from what?” Chloe swung her feet to the ground. When she didn’t feel dizzy or queasy, she stood.

Kitty watched her. “Almost forty hours, but you sort of woke to drink and use the necessary. The fever makes it a little hazy for most folks.” Her voice grew even more comforting. “You’re adjusting from the trip here, but the worst is passed.”

“Right. The trip . . . here,” Chloe echoed.

She walked over to a curtained area that she vaguely remembered Kitty showing her at some point. It was a small victory to not have to ask for the strange woman’s support to go to the toilet and washing area.

When she returned, Kitty gave her an approving look. “You’re not dreaming. Not dead. Not in a coma.” She ticked each item off on her fingers. The cloth in her hand fluttered with each motion. “You’re in the Wasteland. Why? No one seems to know. I’ve been here twenty-six years. Same as Jack.”

“But . . . you don’t look”—Chloe did quick math—“like someone from the 1980s . . . or like you’re old enough to have been anywhere that long.”

“We don’t age once we get here. This is it.” Kitty held her arms out in a look-at-that gesture. “I’ll never get any older on the outside—or have kids, as far as we can tell.”

Chloe stared at her, trying to digest the idea of not aging. That part didn’t sound awful. The idea of never having kids, on the other hand, sounded less appealing. It wasn’t that she’d planned to have them anytime soon, but the idea of not having the choice to ever have them was sobering.

Kitty walked past her and picked up a torn skirt. “And it wasn’t the 1980s when I came to the Wasteland. Time’s off between here and home. It was 1870 at home when I came here. Sometimes there are big gaps in the times people are from. No one’s come through who’s later than 1989 or earlier than me and Jack.”

“I’m later.” Chloe tried to concentrate on the details, the words Kitty was saying. If not, if she thought about the big picture, the sheer impossibility of it all, she might fall apart. “It’s 2013 at home. I walked into a bar. Then I was here.”

Kitty looked at her for a moment, shrugged, and said, “It was bound to happen.”

When Chloe didn’t reply, Kitty carried the skirt and her needle and thread to a spot on the ground. She sat on the floor with the skirt and ruffle in her lap. Somehow, that seemed more absurd than anything else so far, or maybe Chloe had simply reached her threshold for absurdity. She began laughing, but after a few moments the laughs began to sound suspiciously like sobs.

“You’re doing fine, all things considered,” Kitty said, not unkindly. Then she looked down at her sewing as if she couldn’t tell that Chloe was crying.

Chloe stared at the 1800s woman who was calmly sewing in the middle of a tent in the desert, and Kitty very obviously pretended not to be waiting for her to pull it together—or maybe she didn’t care if Chloe pulled it together. There was no way to know short of asking, and Chloe didn’t feel much like doing that. They stayed that way for a few minutes until Chloe broke the silence by asking, “Why me?”

Kitty lifted her gaze from the skirt, met Chloe’s eyes. “No one knows.”

“How? How can you say you’ve been here that long and don’t know?” Her voice grew a bit shrill as panic edged back closer to the surface.

The smile Kitty offered veered closer to sardonic than anything else. She pulled the thread through another stitch and then another before saying, “Depends on who you ask. My brother thinks we’re here as a punishment for some sort of sins, and we need to atone for our failings.”

“I had a drink,” Chloe objected. “Lots of people drink. I was an ass for years when I was a lush, but I’ve been sober the past five years. What in the hell am I being punished for?” She swiped at her cheeks. “One drink shouldn’t mean I wake up in wherever this is.”

“There’s a washbasin with cool water.” Kitty pointed at a stoneware basin with tiny little flowers painted all over it.

Chloe was splashing water on her face when she heard Kitty say, “She’s fine, Jack. Get to bed. You patrolled and then stood guard. When did you sleep last?”

“Hector offered to finish out the last hour of my shift,” Jack said.

Chloe didn’t want to turn around and face the cowboy who had carried her out of the desert last night. As she patted her face dry, she forced herself to picture her fiancé screwing her boss instead of thinking about how kind Jack had been. She might not be in the world she knew, but there were constants she suspected were the same no matter what world she lived in. And he can’t look as good as I thought he did. I was half out of it.

Appropriately fortified, she turned to see baby blues, perfect cheekbones, and lean muscles. She’d never been a cowboy fan, but one look at him had her revising that stance. Realizing she was staring, she tried to speak but only managed to say, “Damn . . . I mean . . . Hi. I . . . Thank you. For carrying me, I mean.”

Kitty laughed. Whether at the look of wide-eyed confusion on her brother’s face or at Chloe’s mortified stuttering, Chloe couldn’t say.

Jack clearly didn’t know what to say either. He looked at his sister and then at Chloe. “No need to thank me.” He cleared his throat. “I just stopped here because . . . you’re new. It takes time to adjust and . . .” His words trailed off, and he bounced a little as if he was having trouble standing still.

“He’s trying not to say that he’s our fearless leader or that he has a crippling need to meddle,” Kitty interjected.

“Katherine,” Jack warned in a voice that held no real threat. Chloe could see that he was clenching his jaw. In his hand was a mostly empty bottle of some sort of wine.

Chloe stared at it. Until she’d seen it, she’d been wondering if maybe through some act of god or magic or science, she’d come to their world without the alcoholism that had hovered at the edge of her life for so many years. Clearly, she hadn’t. She fisted her hands and backed away as he lifted the bottle.

“Before I hit the bunk, I wanted to bring this by.” He walked farther into the tent, and Chloe had the stray thought that he was moving slowly and deliberately like a hunter expecting his prey to bolt.

Kitty was staring at the bottle suspiciously. “Where did that come from?”

“I don’t drink,” Chloe forced herself to say. “Please take it away.”

“It’ll help.” Jack pulled the stopper out of the bottle. “It’s medicinal.”

Kitty stepped between them. “What is that?”

Chloe started shaking. One drink wouldn’t hurt. Things were already a mess. She held out her hand.

Jack pushed past his sister, grabbed a cup that had been left beside the bed where Chloe had been sleeping, and poured the port-colored liquid into it. He didn’t look at Kitty as he said, “You know what it is, Katherine. Verrot. Ajani’s coming around soon, and we don’t have time for a slow recovery.”

“Jackson!” Kitty grabbed his arm. “I don’t care. You can’t give her—”

“Drink it,” he interrupted as he handed Chloe the cup.

Shakily, Chloe lifted it to her lips. She wasn’t sure what Verrot was, but the moment the liquid hit her tongue she knew it wasn’t wine or any other type of booze she’d tried over the years. She’d consumed some truly horrible rotgut during the worst of her drunken spells, but this made everything she’d ever had seem delicious in comparison—and yet, she swallowed it greedily. She couldn’t bring herself to lower the cup from her mouth.

“It’ll help,” he murmured.

Kitty was yelling at him, but Chloe couldn’t concentrate on a word she said. Fortunately, Jack stood between her and his sister, and Chloe had a strange burst of relief that he did so, because even though the Verrot was vile, she wasn’t sure she could willingly let Kitty take the cup.

Chloe was licking the last drops from the cup like a child with a bowl of ice cream when she realized what Kitty was saying: “You gave her fucking vampire blood on her first day?” She shoved Jack toward the door of the tent. “Get out. Now.”

It was all Chloe could do to lower the now empty cup. Very carefully, she said, “Excuse me? Is that a brand or—”

“No.” Kitty came back over to her, took the cup, and led her to a chair. “It’s exactly what it sounds like.” Gently, she stroked a hand over Chloe’s hair. “It’s not always so weird here, and as much as it pains me to say it, I’m certain he thinks he had a good reason to give it to you.”

“To give me vampire blood?” Chloe clarified. A part of her was oddly relieved that it was vampire blood because if alcohol was that good here, she’d be so far into the bottle that she’d never crawl out again. “Like blood from a . . .”

“They’re called bloedzuigers. They’re not like in the stories at home; they’re not dead or anything. They just live a long time, and their blood is restorative.” Kitty paused as if she was determining what to say. “You’ll be fine, though. It’s a shitty way to start your first day here, but you can handle it.”

“Okay,” Chloe said. She repeated the word, more firmly this time. “It’s okay.” She leaned back, trying not to push past Kitty and run. She felt like her entire body was on fast-forward, like she could do anything—and she would do anything to get another taste of the Verrot. “I feel very good right now. Thank you. Is there more?”